Friday, September 14, 2007

An inline explanation of what it means to be a column-oriented database would have been nice. For that I referred to wikipedia's Column-oriented DBMS page.

My conclusion is that your run-of-the-mill RDBMS can easily provide a new table type that uses column-oriented storage, without varying anything else (same SQL, same drivers, same integrations).

That leaves Vertica and its column-oriented friends in a dicey position: as soon as money starts flowing towards columns instead of rows, the big boys wake up and add a column-oriented storage option. Then everyone sighs and upgrades to Oracle 12p or whatever they end up calling it.